An Instagram Model Tinder-Scammed Dozens of Men Into Coming to Union Square to Compete for a Date

The summer of scam has a new hero, and her name is Natasha Aponte. What did Ms. Aponte do to warrant this title? She used Tinder to con dozens of men into believing they were meeting her for a one-on-one date in Union Square. When the men arrived, they discovered that instead of a date … they’d be competing against each other to win it.

The scam came to light after a man, who asked only to be identified as Misha, tweeted a now-viral thread about falling for the date scam. Misha said he matched with Aponte on Tinder “a few weeks ago,” and after chatting a little on the app, they moved over to text messaging. (Okay, sounds normal.) After texting some more, Aponte told him she was busy with a work “presentation,” but would text him again in a few weeks when she had more free time.

Misha assumed she was ghosting on him, but to his surprise, Aponte texted him again a week later, inviting him to meet in Union Square where she said her friend was DJing. He agreed — as did, unbeknownst to Misha, a few dozen other men.

A number of men Select All spoke with confirmed a similar pattern of events, from meeting her on Tinder to the texting hiatus to the out-of-the-blue date invitation to Union Square. “A month ago she contacted me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to get drinks?’ I agreed … because this is an attractive-looking woman. Then she said, ‘Oh, I’m getting held up because of my presentation.’ I thought that was weird because she said on Instagram she was an actress and model. I didn’t see anything about her working in an office,” said Spencer, another scam victim.

Aponte texted to let him know they were on rain or shine. Connor Murray, another guy whom she told the same thing, thought this was fishy: “She texted me yesterday morning saying that it would be rain or shine … who says that for a date?”

I'm like well I'll be damned. Genuinely didn't think she would message me. I reply "yeah I should be free, I'd be down" she says "amazing I'm gonna be running around today and tomorrow but just come around 6 and I'll meet you by the stage then we'll head out"

When Misha arrived in Union Square, he found a small crowd gathered around the stage. Aponte had told him to meet her at the front. “I guess [the crowd] was mostly male, but that didn’t immediately register to me,” Misha told Select All. “As I was watching the DJ play booming techno on a Sunday I did think it was odd that that many people were staying around and paying attention so attentively instead of just stopping and walking on.”

David, another man who showed up for a date, said he realized something was up when “the guy next to me went ‘Are you trying to meet up with a girl named Natasha?’” Eventually, “everyone started realizing what was going on.” “I got there and a DJ was playing and I found out that hundreds of other guys were also waiting for Natasha,” Spencer said. “I walked away when I found out it was a scam.” He heard people booing as he left Union Square.

“Her first questions to people were ‘Are you over five-foot-ten?’ and ‘Please don’t be named Jimmy,’” David said.

A video from the DJ, Nick AM, shows Aponte’s welcome speech in full. “I am single … dating apps are very difficult, and I said, Okay, how do I solve this problem … maybe I can bring everyone in person and see how that goes and solve this once and for all. So do you have what it takes to compete against everyone here to win a date with me … look around the crowd, can you last longer than all these other guys?”

“Half of you people here are in relationships, so those people should leave now,” Aponte continued. “Statistically, people who are on dating apps … half of them are in relationships. Those people should leave.” Men in the crowd started chanting “Shut the fuck up.” Aponte also said anyone not comfortable being filmed should leave. (There were people with cameras filming the stunt, though it remains unclear for what purpose. Several men left at this point.)

“We’re going to start the elimination now. If you think you can support Trump and date a Puerto Rican now’s the time to leave.” She also asked tourists and people who didn’t live in the United States to leave. (This is when the men named “Jimmy” were also asked to depart: “I don’t enjoy the name Jimmy.”) She asked the men to raise their left hands if their last relationship ended because their girlfriends had ended it. Right hands were to be raised if they had ended it. Anybody with a left hand up was asked to leave. “Please leave because I completely trust her judgement,” Aponte said. She also asked anybody looking for just a hookup to leave, along with anybody with a beer belly, a long beard, khakis, Toms shoes, or who is a smoker or an alcoholic. “I just want honesty,” a man shouted at her from the crowd as she listed her requests.

After thinning the crowd significantly, Aponte asked the men to come closer to the stage. “Other people told me she made the guys sprint, do push-ups, and she walked up to the guys and ‘swiped left or right’ on them,’” Spencer said. “This is what I’ve heard … and if it’s public humiliation in front of hundreds of people. She also gave guys a minute to explain why they should date her.”

A post shared by David Pepe (@davidpepe_) on Aug 19, 2018 at 4:43pm PDT

Aponte has since locked down her social-media presence. Her Instagram, which proclaims her a “New York City baby” and “world traveller,” and that “the world is too small to contain me,” is now private. (Spencer says she lost several hundred followers on Sunday night. The current count is 2,795.) Select All’s attempts to reach Aponte for comment were unsuccessful, though I have now listened to her cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” several times and am intimately acquainted with her lone SoundCloud track.

As for her so-called victims, most of them have a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing. “I think it’s hilarious so I’m happy I was a part of it,” David told me. “If anything, she just seemed more forward than most women you’d find on a dating site.” Others, however, are still smarting. “I’m not a therapist … but I think that this woman is completely narcissistic, borderline delusional, completely vain, and just a shallow human being that only cares about getting more attention for herself,” Spencer said. “She’s like the female, slightly more attractive version of Donald Trump, and you can quote me on that.”

Update, August 20, 2018, at 2:36 p.m.: Natasha Aponte responded to Select All via Instagram DM and directed us to Rob Bliss Creative, a viral-video agency. “We will be releasing something on Thursday with all relevant information,” a representative for RBC told Select All, which gives us a better idea of just why those cameras were at the event in the first place. Still … good scam though.

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THE FEED

28 mins ago

Reading the election results almost two weeks later

Benjamin Hart3:05 PM

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI

JUST IN: Sens. Blumenthal, Whitehouse and Hirono file lawsuit challenging President Trump’s appointment of Acting AG Whitaker, arguing the appointment is unconstitutional because Whitaker was not in Senate-confirmed post.

New: “The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that Ron Chernow, one of the most eminent biographers of American presidents and statesmen, will be the featured speaker at its annual dinner on Saturday, April 27, 2019.” History and First Amendment theme.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

The traditional news media amplify his words for a variety of reasons, including newsworthiness (he is, after all, the president), easy ratings (cable-news audiences have soared in his term), and old-fashioned peer pressure (the segment producer’s lament: “If everybody else is carrying Trump, shouldn’t we?”).

But a virus doesn’t just borrow a host’s cellular factory to reproduce; it often destroys the host in the process. The traditional news media are thoroughly infected by the Trump virus. It is not only spreading the disease of the president’s lies, but also suffering from a demise in public trust—at least among one half of the electorate.

Entrusted as the landlord to 400,000 people, the Housing Authority has struggled for years to fulfill its mission amid a strangled budget and almost endemic political neglect. Last week, a judge suggested strongly that the federal government should take over the agency after an investigation found evidence of deep mismanagement, including that the Housing Authority failed to perform lead inspections and then falsely claimed it had. Six top executives lost their jobs amid the federal investigation; a complaint was filed in June.

But the authority did not just ignore the required lead inspections, The New York Times found.

For at least two decades, almost every time a child in its apartments tested positive for high lead levels, Nycha launched a counteroffensive, city records show. From 2010 through July of this year, the agency challenged 95 percent of the orders it received from the Health Department to remove lead detected in Nycha apartments.

The list is a culmination of all the people who were reported missing — and remain unaccounted for — since the devastating Camp fire erupted in Butte County in the early hours of Nov. 8, consuming entire neighborhoods in just hours. That number dropped Sunday for the first time in days, from 1,202 to 993. But it raises a startling question: Could that many people really have died in the blaze?

Authorities say probably not.

The data are far from perfect. Some people may be listed twice, or more. Others may be safe somewhere, unaware that someone is looking for them.

“This is a dynamic list,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told reporters. “It will fluctuate both up and down, every day.”

Nissan Motor Co. will remove Carlos Ghosn as chairman after he was arrested in Tokyo for violations of financial law, throwing the auto industry’s largest global alliance into turmoil.

Ghosn, a towering figure who saved Nissan from collapse and brought it together with Renault SA and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., was detained Monday in Tokyo over a suspected breach of Japanese financial laws, Nissan Chief Executive Officer Hiroto Saikawa told reporters in Yokohama, Japan. Ghosn and Director Greg Kelly have been under investigation at Nissan for several months, and the board is set to meet Thursday to remove them both.